After walking across the graduation stage to receive your diploma, after a huge celebratory dinner with your family and getting drunk with your classmates, after opening all those (hopefully!) cash-filled envelopes and doing a little victory dance around your bedroom, it finally starts to sink in: you’re in the real world now. Now’s the moment to put those big dreams into action.

Because that sounds about a hundred million times simpler than it is, our editors are sharing the best things they’ve learned since leaving the comfortable bubble of college. Click through the slideshow above for their words of wisdom now—and good luck! Everything’s going to work out, we promise.